Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday February 22, 2010 @05:29PM
from the like-sanitation-director-only-you-do-less dept.

Trailrunner7 writes to tell us that US cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt recently gave an interview where he discusses his career and what he sees as the priorities of the positions. "Howard Schmidt has been involved in just about every aspect of the security industry during his career. After stints in the Air Force and at Microsoft, he served as a cybersecurity advisor to George W. Bush. Now, after heading back to the private sector for several years, he's been appointed to serve as President Obama's security advisor."

As covered by Slashdot last week, [slashdot.org] a team of Bush-era staffers simulating a White House situation room responding to a "March Madness" trojan app attack was broadcast repeatedly by CNN over the weekend. That simulated attack turned smartphones into a botnet, then started attacking the Internet, and then with communications down it was easy for a few explosions to knock out power to the East Coast. The team failed... they took too long arguing over what they couldn't do instead of doing what they could. For example, telling people to shut off smartphones was met with theories into how they could require smartphones to go offline.. and that was just a waster of clock time because there's no law providing for that.

The government needs the help of geeks, but the problem is anybody who gets into government wants to give themselves too much power, and that turns out ruining them.

Now some of the universities that I teach at, such as Georgia Tech and Idaho State University, our Scholarship for Service programs, as soon as they get done, they’re going in government, fairly high-level positions as security experts.

The wisdom of this is simultaneously frightening and brilliant.

“Hey, I’m seeing this really anonymous activity on this particular port. Are you guys seeing that?” “Yeah, we are.” Well, that solves problems and that’s what this is all about.

Mission accomplished! (In a GWB ironical reference kind of way)

and many people don’t realize that there is not the one power company that looks after the entire country.